


Wellspring

by skatzaa



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Force Ghost(s), Gen, Meditation, Post-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Pre-Star Wars: A New Hope, Tatooine (Star Wars), Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 20:09:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20452862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skatzaa/pseuds/skatzaa
Summary: Ben meditates, and meets a ghost. She's just not the ghost he's been expecting.





	Wellspring

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shadaras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/gifts).

> Shadaras, I don't feel like I quite fulfilled the exact letter of your prompt, but I hope I captured the spirit of it at least.

Ben treks across the dunes, one arm held out to better keep his balance. It’s just before dawn—there’s an orange haze on the horizon, but no sign of the suns themselves just yet—and already, sweat slicks his back and covers his brow.

He’s been on Tatooine for nearly a year—an eternity already, it seems—and still, Qui-Gon’s spirit has yet to appear before him as Yoda said.

Sand slides under his feet. Ben stumbles and lands hard on his wrist.

“Banthashit,” he hisses, cradling his arm to his chest as he staggers to his feet. Any sort of injury, here on the edges of the Wastes, can be deadly, and it’s his dominant wrist to boot.

Plus, he’s fairly certain there’s sand in the beard he keeps meaning to shave but hasn’t gotten around to dealing with yet.

Ben continues up the slope, but this time, he opens himself to the Force as much as he dares. It flows through him and around him, lessening the ache in his wrist and soothing his stung ego. Who knows, maybe it will keep him aware enough that he won’t fall again.

The top of the dune beckons, and Ben finds himself slowing to a stop as soon as he reaches it.

The basin stretches out before him. There’s not much to see other than sand dunes, if the viewer doesn’t know what they’re looking for or what there is to see.

He lowers himself, settling on his knees with his shins beneath him. As he watches, light continues to creep across the world, burnishing the sands and deepening shadows. 

It’s beautiful, and made even more so by the life that he feels surrounding him, even in the desert.

Ben closes his eyes and exhales.

If his body is in the desert, his mind floats in an ocean vaster than any planet. The currents of the Force swirl and eddy around him, tugging at his consciousness. The flow isn’t strong enough to pull Ben completely from himself, and so he allows himself to drift.

There is life all around him, from the smallest microbes in the air to the great, slumbering sarlacc pits some distance to the north. The Tuskens leave this area untouched for the most part, as a result of Ben’s presence here, but he can feel the impressions of them in the landscape. They’ve shaped the planet for eons longer than any human settlers, and their marks will remain for much longer.

He keeps his breathing steady as he sinks into world, letting it all flow through him. Ben has to restrict his range to the few uninhabited miles around him, because the last thing he needs is to disturb the wrong person and end up with a legion of stormtroopers—or, worse, Vader himself—arriving at his doorstep.

Then he feels it: a disturbance in the Force. A slight ripple a few lengths away, then a sensation not unlike the thickening of batter as one continually stirs it, as the disturbance concentrates itself in one spot.

Ben opens his eyes.

A woman stands at the base of the dune, dressed in simple, rough garb, hair pulled back from her face into a braided bun. Her hands are folded together in front of her and she stares up at him. The longer he looks at her, the stranger she seems, until he realizes, quite abruptly, that she’s radiating a blue haze, so light it’s hardly noticeable against the blue of the pre-dawn sky, like she’s a holograph rather than a real person.

Ben stays where he is, hands resting on his knees. They look at each other across the stretch of sand, the woman calm, Ben allowing the waves of his confusion to wash over and off of him.

He blinks, and the woman is no longer below him but kneeling at his side, her skirts tucked neatly around her legs. He can feel _ where _ she is in the Force, that same rippling disturbance, but he cannot, Ben realizes, feel  _ her.  _

In the end, his curiosity wins out over his patience, and he says, rather than asks, “You’re a ghost.”

She nods. This close, when he turns to look at her, she’s both older and younger than he thought, the skin of her face weathered by sun and hardship rather than simply age. There’s something familiar about her, but without a Force signature, he can’t place how he might know her.

This is not the ghost he was expecting, but Ben supposes that beggars—or, in this case, hermits—cannot be choosers. It proves, at least, that the  _ theory _ is right, which means that Qui-Gon is simply _choosing_ not to appear to him. As a younger man, the thought might have wounded him more, but Ben reassures himself that anyone stubborn enough to remain a separate entity even  _ after  _ becoming one with the Force—and little gods knew Qui-Gon had been stubborn enough—is also very likely to refuse to appear somewhere simply because someone wants him to.

“Are– _ were _ you Force sensitive?” he asks.

She glances at him from the corner of her eye, gentle amusement showing in the curl of her mouth. 

“I wasn’t aware of it in life, no,” she says. “But I might’ve been.”

Something about the phrasing strikes Ben as unusual, and he says, “It doesn’t seem as though  _ you _ believe that to be the reason why you're still here.”

“Very astute, Mister Kenobi,” she says. “Tatooine has magic of her own, things that off-worlders never quite understand. Who’s to say why the desert chose to give life to my spirit once more?”

Ben turns that over in his mind. As a youngling, and even as a Padawan, he might’ve argued the point, saying that all magic comes from the Force in the end, but he’s since mastered the ability to hold his tongue. Truly, he cannot claim to be an expert on how the Force chooses to move, and he cannot say with any certainty that it is the  _ only _ power at work in the galaxy. Perhaps she’s right, perhaps not, but he learned long ago that it does no one any good to try and strip another of their beliefs.

“You don’t believe me,” she says, her voice warm with fondness that he likely doesn’t deserve. “I don’t blame you. We are all raised to believe different things, in the end.”

“May I ask your name, madam?” Ben ventures, feeling his face heat up when she sends him a wry glance. 

“I think I’ll leave that for you to discover on your own,” she says. 

Well, Ben thinks grimly, I’ve apparently met the only confirmed ghost in the galaxy, and she’s just obscure as Qui-Gon was. 

“Why are you here? Why me?” he asks instead, becoming increasingly aware of the heat of the suns on his face. He looks out toward the horizon and sees that Tatoo I has risen, painting the world gold. Even knowing how deadly it can be, he finds the sight beautiful. 

He asked, but there’s the heavy sense of inevitability weighing on his heart, and he is not surprised when the woman simply says, “Luke.”

Ben drops his gaze to his hands and finds that they are clutching his knees tightly. It takes quite a bit of conscious effort to make himself relax once more. 

“Owen won’t let me see him,” he says, knowing that even if Owen allowed it, he wouldn’t have the faintest idea of what to  _ do _ .

The woman hums as she smiles. “Owen always was stubborn. He resented Anakin, I think, for escaping Tatooine, though Owen has never had aspirations beyond becoming a moisture farmer like his father was.”

Ben considers this new level of familiarity.

“Owen is a freeborn man of a freeborn family, stretching back generations,” the woman continues. “Luke is the freeborn son of a freed slave. That will affect him, however little he knows it. There’s much Owen won’t understand about Luke’s place on Tatooine.”

“But  _ I _ was never—” Ben protests, only to stop at the look she sends him. He amends, “It wasn’t the same.”

“No,” she agrees. She hasn’t moved since she sat down beside him; a perk of being a ghost, he supposes. Ben’s own knees are beginning to ache, and he shifts to relieve the pressure, still careful not to jostle his wrist, though the pain has mostly faded. “But you helped raise Anakin, and you understood the troubles he faced as a freed slave.”

Ben is already shaking his head. “I’m not sure that I did, if we’re being honest. There’s so much he kept from me, so much he never wanted to speak about. Not” —he adds quickly, when he sees the look on her face— “that I blame him. I simply can’t help but think that everything might’ve gone differently, had he confided in me from the beginning. If I had let him know that I could be trusted with such things.”

“Anakin made his own choices,” the woman says, and he can feel her sadness and longing in the Force, soaking into the sand and air around them. She’s a wellspring of emotion, held tightly in check, but even she cannot withhold her grief. “But even still, that’s not my point. Beru is the freeborn granddaughter of freed slaves; she will teach Luke what he needs to know about his Tatooinian heritage.”

Legacy, Ben realizes. She’s talking about legacy, what one generation passes on to the next. He bows his head.

“The Jedi are gone, Shmi,” he says, feeling the familiar grief well up within him. “Even if I were to teach him, if Owen would allow it, what good would it do?”

Ben feels a pressure on his arm and looks up to see her hand, faintly blue, resting on his bicep. Shmi smiles at him, as warm as the sunlight on his skin.

“Owen will come around, given time,” she tells him. “Luke should know of the Jedi and his father, just as he should know about slavery and his grandmother. You can do that for him.”

Ben stares at her beseechingly, hoping she’ll understand the turmoil in his heart, though he hardly understands it himself. He doesn’t know that he could survive another youngling, especially one of Anakin’s blood. He gives too much of himself, he knows that. To teach Luke would be to give him the power to destroy Ben completely, to finish what Anakin's apprenticeship had begun.

“As you said, you are the last of the Jedi,” Shmi says, fading slightly as the sunlight intensifies. Tatoo II has risen. “Teach him about the past, but do not trap him there. Create new traditions, learn to see the galaxy differently. You will learn from one another, but trust me when I say that he  _ must _ learn. You are the only one who can teach him, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

She disappears from sight.

Ben stumbles upright, heart pounding. She would have him—what, abandon the Code, and the memory of all those who died to defend it and the galaxy?

_ No _ . That isn’t what she meant and he knows it. But Ben can’t quite make himself swallow the truth of what she’s said, not yet.

Knees stiff, he starts down the dune in the direction of his home. Shmi gave him much to think about, things that will require longer meditation. But it will be hot soon, and he can’t stay out in the open for much longer without risking sun sickness.

He’ll meditate on what she said and trust the Force to guide him in the correct decision.

Ben walks onward as the suns shine ever brighter.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
